Archive for High School

This is my translation of a poem by my homeboy Makhdoom Mohiuddin. I did this last week, and the translation is still a work in progress — so if you know Urdu and English, and have suggestions, please hit me up in the comments (same goes for transliteration).

The poem itself was collected in his 1944 anthology, Surkh Sawera, or Red Dawn.

When I slept in the shade of love
Even thorns seemed to be flowers then

That was a matter of the beginning of passion!
That was a night of love, full of stars

My heart’s strings were struck by the pick
Fires rose up, a kind of intoxication cast over

The one endowed with beauty was endowed abundantly
The one I looked at endlessly was revelation

Once my whole heart was washed over with lightning
Lightning was dissolved in my every vein

My heart’s amusement became the reason for my heart’s pain
My heart’s amusement became the story of my tears

My life began to change in a moment
My life began to be cast in the mould of sorrow

The day of love declined, the evening began
My heart began to throb, my eyes began to cry

Night and day came and went like this
Finding beauty and love finished

Revelation. I’ve translated toor as revelation. toor literally means hill or mountain, but refers to Mount Sinai and to the revelation received by Moses there. On Mount Sinai:

When Moses came to Our appointment and his Lord spoke to him, he said: ‘My Lord, show me Yourself that I may look upon You.’ He said: ‘You shall not see Me, but look instead upon that mountain. If it remains firmly in place you shall see Me.’ When the glory of his Lord appeared upon the mountain, it levelled it to the ground. Moses fell down, unconscious. When he came to, he said: ‘Glory be to You! I have repented before You and I am the first among believers.’ (Qur’an 7:143)

A high school teacher in Los Angeles got fired for encouraging her students to be, well, socially engaged. Karen Salazar was accused of teaching a curriculum that was too “Afro-centric”. You see, teaching texts like the Autobiography of Malcolm X is dangerous. Students organizing and mobilizing on the high school campus was apparently too much for stuffed up administrators (and most definitely, their higher ups) to see and deal with, so they do what they usually do in such circumstances: Scapegoat a teacher, because, of course, students themselves are too stupid to do anything on their own, and press down on her. In this case, they’ve decided to fire Ms. Salazar.

No, wait, it wasn’t that the curriculum was too “Afro-centric” after all — the materials, apparently, were appropriate. It’s just that her teaching style crossed the line into advocacy. You see, when someone encourages you to change the conditions in society that produce inequality and injustice, that’s inappropriate. Ms. Salazar quotes Paulo Freire, she says one should practice “education as the practice of freedom.” In a democratic country, where education is supposed to be a pillar of freedom, that would be all right. But in countries which pass themselves as democracies but practice so many dispersed forms of tyranny, education needs to be the brainwashing of students to toe the line.

And by firing Karen Salazar, that’s precisely what these administrators are trying to enforce. It’s not that she teaches Malcolm X and Tupac, or that she quotes Freire. It’s that students are organizing and mobilizing, learning to work together in cooperative and collective frameworks to challenge authority and change things for the better. And that’s too much.

Learn more about the struggle of the students to have Ms. Salazar reinstated — including videos of their mass actions — here: http://savesalazar.pbwiki.com/

shawn and i posed some questions to schweitzer concerning the chemistry…

us: Regarding the molecule write-up, what does it mean when it wants 5 physical properties of chemicals in the reaction??
can i just list its physical properties? like this: mp, bp, solubility..etc?

him: I want you to try and tie the properties into your reactions. Listing the properties is BORING.
Explaining how the properties effect the use of your molecule is better.

what if we can’t find enough enough chemical poroperties in reaction or enough physical properties?
and HOW are we supposed to explain things with limited understanding?

The answer is research to understand as much as you can, and avoid the stuff you don’t understand at all.

the entire project overall is simple enough
the tricky part is this chemistry thing

that would be the point.

we can see these reactions, but what are we supposed to extract from them?

As much as you can, and then do your best to explain it to the rest of us.

The point of this is for you to take a look at a specific molecule, and using the knowledge gained through the course and via your reseatch to do some in depth analysis. Analysis of what? well that will depend on the direction your research led you. No two people will be exactly the same.
That’s why the marking scheme is fairly generic. I’m inventing an updated version, but it will also be fairly generic – it has to be.

I know that’s not much help, but that’s what you are more or less stuck with.
BTW, these are questions you guys should have asked months ago.

chemistry project, what to say about your molecule (my suggestions):
- what is it?
- what does it do?
(explain it in general)
- physical properties
- chemical properties
(try to explain these in terms of what we’ve learned this year, e.g., how molecular packing is related to melting point, etc.)
- common reactions (e.g., in metabolic pathways, etc.)
- experimental reactions (e.g., from journals)
(try to explain these in terms of the chem/physical properties and what we’ve learned this year)
- applications of your chemical (if possible/necessary)

i was watching a paul martin interview on cbc newsworld
their bloody ticker is very annoying, it needs to go
anyway, paul martin seems shady to me

go NDP

in the provincial elections, students who are graduating now from high school really need to get voting
we wield immense power for our ridings
consider if there’s three high schools in a riding with an average of 600 students graduating, and only 400 can vote
that’s still 1,200 voters, out of 100,000 people
out of whom only around 60,000 vote
that’s 2%
which is not bad… sometimes 2% is all it takes to make a difference
so students need to get organized, realize their potential, see what suits THEM and THEIR interests — not those of their parents — and get voting

i was watching a documentary on hugo chavez, president of venezuela
this dude is tite
anyway, he gets letters from all over the country, every day
he has a few people working on reading each and every letter, no matter how small, and these people highlight the main points and make notes
THAT IS GODDAMN AMAZING!
people want hugo chavez out of power, the rich people in venezuela do, because he’s a socialist and believes in properly distributing the oil wealth of the country
(where 80% of the population lives in poverty, and the rich 20% control the media… go figure)

anyway

i went to the zoo for the interview
he asked me a question and i made a fool of myself
“use four words to describe yourself”
er… :long pause: … intelligent — no, intellectual … er.. outgoing and … um … eloquent?
then a huge pause, like a minute, “i’m at a loss for words” and finally i pipe up “creative!”